Pembroke Center
Charlie Tyson
Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow
Last updated
June 2026
Biography
Ph.D. English, Harvard University, 2023
Charlie Tyson is a literary critic focusing on modern British literature, aesthetics, and the politics of work and leisure. His first book, The Art of Idleness: The Questioning of Work in Modern Literature (under contract with Harvard University Press, expected 2028), examines how literature, from the late-nineteenth century forward, increasingly takes up the task of putting pressure on the work ethic and imagining forms of life detached from, or resistant to, the demands of productivity. Ranging from late-nineteenth century naturalism to Bloomsbury, Black flanerie, and the novels of Alan Hollinghurst, the book shows how idleness became central for how modern literature thinks about pleasure, beauty, freedom, and the good life.
He is concurrently working on a book for general readers, tentatively titled The Gospel of Laziness, a work of cultural criticism and intellectual history about how we came to search for our true selves in work. Drawing on a range of materials (from medieval warnings against sloth to the performatively entrepreneurial world of The Real Housewives), the book develops a positive philosophy of leisure, focusing on virtues and capabilities that the work ethic tends to suppress or sideline.
Tyson's essays, reviews, and features have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications, and his writing has been translated into several languages.
In fall 2026, Tyson will teach the GNSS course "The Politics of Productivity," on how productivity became the central value of the contemporary work ethic, and how artists and writers have responded to the imperative to be productive.
Tyson holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and master's degrees in History of Science (2016) and in English (2015) from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received his BA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia in 2014.